An emerging trend of including women in all development activities as a part of overall development initiatives of a country has become rampant around the world. At the same time, nation States are emphasizing on gender mainstreaming and women empowerment because overall development is impossible without emancipation of women that comprises the three-fifths of the one billion poorest people of the world population (UNDP 2006).
That is why international organizations like United Nations (UN) and its affiliated organizations- United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), World Bank (WB), and regional organizations like OXFAM International, Save the Children, International Organization for Migration (IOM), CARE, ActionAid, Aus AID and numerous local organizations started including women in different development projects with special preference.
However, the pathways of making them realize the development issue of women was not an easy one. It was not until the rise of feminism through intellectual pursuits, debates, protests worldwide paved the way forward for women in development thinking. Today world leaders are united to promote women's development which is reflected in several agendas of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as continuum of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
The necessity of gender discourse arose out of the discrimination faced by women around the world from the very beginning until 1970s, women were neither counted by development planners and policy makers nor counted as work-force in economic activities and women were deprived of decision-making position at public, private and domestic level. They were also excluded from exercising political and legal rights and access to education and it was considered justifiable as contribution of women were not counted as economic activity.
And there were two reasons for this- women's needs and requirements were unknown for being absent from economic activities and taken for dependent on men. Women's works were recognised as 'leisure' activity rather than 'real' work for not having formal time-table of workplace. Secondly, women used to be the owner of vegetable lawn having no economic value whereas men enjoyed the ownership of grain fields which were used as cash crops. All these finally gave rise to power imbalance between men and women. Therefore, the study of gender relations has become essential.
Eventually the consciousness of gender relations led to the rise of feminism that attempted to deconstruct the existing development theories which were mainly masculine until the late 1960s. Initially, the rise of feminism was marked by Judith Sargent Murray's On the Equality of the Sexes published in 1790. However, Marry Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), influenced by the French Revolution was most significantly thought to be laid the foundation of feminism that developed immediately at the age of enlightenment.
Although feminism was rooted from political movement known as the first wave of feminism in the latter half of the 19th century with the historic achievement of right to vote in Britain and the United States in the decade of 1918-1928, gradually took up critical stance on the existing social settings. These included forms of gender inequality close to political issues like disparity in land rights, pays-allowances, reproductive rights, sexual harassment and absence of women in development policies. As for example in Asian community, characterises Asian young women at the lowest level and mother as merely a housewife which delimited the course of gender development and women empowerment.
On the other hand, the first phase of feminist movement began with the onset of industrialization as early as in the 1830s, when population explosion turned out to be a major threat in the process of development. Growing demands indicated the need for changes in social institutions like conventional marriage which ultimately helped in bringing freedom for young women. And most importantly, the first wave of feminism could manage to unite women around the world irrespective of classes, races, religions, cultures and regional backgrounds for the nature of common sufferings.
In the wake of the growing consciousness among the leaders of feminism, the second wave of its kind was marked by the revolutionary work of Boserup (1970) who dissected gender discrimination at the very micro level. As for example, she held responsible the westerners specifically the colonial administrators and technical advisers for the worsening status of women in developing countries in agriculture as initial maker of development as they promoted male labour force ignoring women during the inception period of modern commercialization of agriculture.
The second stage immensely influenced the contemporary development approaches as the UN took series of initiatives like organizing four world conferences consecutively and observing 'women's year' (1975), and 'women's decade' (1976-85) at the same time. Along with that scholarship funds like UNIFEM and aid projects like WID, GAD, and gender mainstreaming came into being to integrate women in development process.
The third stage of feminism derived from post-structural and postmodern ideas in the early 1990s transcended previous trends of feminism as it replaced overemphasized struggle for universal female identity by queer theory and transgender politics rejecting stereo-typed gender definition. It also took into account antiracism, womanism, black-feminism, eco-feminism, libertarian feminism in relation to women empowerment. Thus it was thought by the emergence of the third phase, the feminist movements took into a matured shape as contemporary development approaches started including women issue seriously and initiating different projects for gender mainstreaming. The third wave is a combination of different binaries of thought, rise of anti-racism at one hand and further development of second wave on the other.
The declaration of human rights agenda after the Second World War and simultaneously the attack on modernisation theory followed by some remarkable international events regarding women during the mid-twentieth century paved the ways for the feminist criticism and as a result women were being started to be considered as distinct identity. However, it was not until the publication of Boserp's ground-breaking Women's Role in Economic Development, in 1970 the development approaches were put into action. Thus women-oriented development projects like Women in Development (WID), Women and Development (WAD), Gender and Development (GAD), Women, Environment, and Development (WED) and Postmodernism and Development (PAD) have come into being by phases.
The writer is a government employee